50,000 generations of bacteria prove that evolution never stops – “[C]omputer models have shown that animals can still experience significant evolutionary changes over time, even in the absence of selectional pressures. Traits like evolvability, or evolutionary potential. Indeed, the Lenski study shows that the same holds true when working with organisms in evolutionary ‘real time.’ The researchers, who performed a comparative analyses of the bacteria after every 500 generations, showed that E. coli will continue to evolve towards increasing replicative efficiency.” – h/t peter turchin! – see also Krazy Kats from greg cochran.

Out of Africa revisited (entrevista a Chris Stringer) – “To what extent do these differences in evolutionary paths, if any, affect the human biodiversity we see today? That is still unclear, but will become clearer in the next few weeks with the publication of new data….”

Neanderthal virus DNA spotted hiding in modern humans – “The DNA of ancient viruses first spotted in the Neanderthal genome have now been identified in modern humans…. [The researchers] examined the genomes of 67 people with cancer, and found they each contained seven of the sequences supposedly unique to the ancient humans.”

How Our Minds Went Viral – “Based on this research, the scientists propose a scenario. Our ancestors millions of years ago were infected with a virus. Eventually it became lodged in our genome. At some point, a mutation moved the virus enhancer next to the PRODH gene. Further mutations allowed it to helped boost the gene’s activity in certain areas of the brain, such as the hippocampus…. Perhaps our minds are partly the way they are today thanks to an infection our ancestors got a few millions of years ago.” – h/t john durant!

Reconstructing the Population Genetic History of the Caribbean – “‘We find evidence of two pulses of African migration. The first pulse—which today is reflected by shorter, older ancestry tracts—consists of a genetic component more similar to coastal West African regions involved in early stages of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The second pulse—reflected by longer, younger tracts—is more similar to present-day West-Central African populations, supporting historical records of later transatlantic deportation. Surprisingly, we also identify a Latino-specific European component that has significantly diverged from its parental Iberian source populations, presumably as a result of small European founder population size. We demonstrate that the ancestral components in admixed genomes can be traced back to distinct sub-continental source populations with far greater resolution than previously thought, even when limited pre-Columbian Caribbean haplotypes have survived.'” – @dienekes’.

The Paradox of Diverse Communities – “Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual ‘neighborhoods’ demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals…. After 20 million-plus simulations, the authors found that the same basic answer kept coming back: The more diverse or integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes, while the more homogenous or segregated it is, the more socially cohesive…. [T]he models demonstrated that it was impossible to simultaneously foster diversity and cohesion ‘in all reasonably likely worlds.’ In fact, the trends are so strong that no effective social policy could combat them, according to Neal. As he put it in a statement, ‘In essence, when it comes to neighborhood desegregation and social cohesion, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.'” – see also original research article: The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community [pdf]. – h/t nearly everybody on twitter!

War’s Enduring Effects on the Development of Egalitarian Motivations and In-Group Biases – “[G]reater exposure to war created a lasting increase in people’s egalitarian motivations toward their in-group, but not their out-groups, during a developmental window starting in middle childhood (around 7 years of age) and ending in early adulthood (around 20 years of age). Outside this window, war had no measurable impact on social motivations in young children and had only muted effects on the motivations of older adults.” – h/t t.greer!

Rural White Liberals – a Key to Understanding the Political Divide – “there are likely several factors involved in shaping the modern American political landscape. Of which, the strongest may be ethnonational origin. This is buttressed by population density pressure, founder effects, internal self-sorting, and perhaps even recent evolution.” – from jayman.

The White man has no friends – “Over the past millennium, Western Europeans have created a social environment where the individual is largely free from collective ties of kinship and ethnicity. Because the State has imposed a monopoly on the use of violence, there is less need to rely on kinsmen to safeguard one’s life and property.” (and ’cause of The Outbreeding Project, too, imho. (^_^) ) – from peter frost.

Butterflies show origin of species as an evolutionary process, not a single event – “The evolution of new species might not be as hard as it seems, even when diverging populations remain in contact and continue to produce offspring…. ‘We find that only a small fraction of the genome is markedly different between closely related species, but then much more of the genome — more than you’d expect — shows similar differences between more distantly related species…. That indicates that the genetic changes that are important for causing speciation are tightly clustered early in speciation, but not so later on in the process; the overall pattern of genome divergence starts slow and then skyrockets.'”

Mating advantage for rare males in wild guppy populations – “Negative frequency-dependent selection (NFDS), a form of selection in which genotypes are favoured when they are rare, can potentially maintain such extensive polymorphism, but few experimental studies have confirmed its operation in nature…. Here we use highly replicated experimental manipulations of natural populations to show that males with rare colour patterns have higher reproductive fitness, demonstrating NFDS mediated by sexual selection. Rare males acquired more mates and sired more offspring compared to common males and, as previously reported, had higher rates of survival.” – h/t rob brooks!

Global patterns of sex-biased migrations in humans – “We found that genetic differentiation between populations was higher for Y chromosome than for the mtDNA at global scales. The migration rate of female might be three times higher than that of male, assuming the effective population size is the same for male and female.” – h/t hbd bibliography!

The rule-dependence model explains the commonalities between the Flynn effect and IQ gains via retesting – “[W]e propose that Flynn effect gains are partly a function of the degree to which a test is dependent on rules or heuristics. This means that testees can become better at solving ‘rule-dependent’ problems over time in response to changing environments, which lead to the improvement of lower-order cognitive processes (such as implicit learning and aspects of working memory). These in turn lead to apparent IQ gains that are partially independent of general intelligence. We argue that the Flynn effect is directly analogous to IQ gains via retesting, noting that Raven’s Progressive Matrices is particularly sensitive to both the effects of retesting and the Flynn effect.” – from woodley and armstrong! (^_^) – see also dr. thompson.

Civilizations rise and fall on the quality of their soil – “Great civilisations have fallen because they failed to prevent the degradation of the soils on which they were founded…. This is according to Professor Mary Scholes and Dr Bob Scholes who have published a paper in the journal Science, which describes how the productivity of many lands has been dramatically reduced as a result of soil erosion, accumulation of salinity, and nutrient depletion.”

Bad reporting generates bad arguments – “The Sunday Times gets 3.5 million readers a week. Anything mentioned in it has a chance of influencing public understanding and opinion in Britain. Last week they did a piece on Professor Robert Plomin’s recent book ‘G is for Genes’ which focuses on the genetic contribution to scholastic achievement. The newspaper’s coverage was misleading….” – of course. – from dr. james thompson.

Embryo Selection for Cognitive Enhancement – “We find that embryo selection, on its own, may have significant impacts, but likely not drastic ones, over the next 50 years, though large effects could accumulate over multiple generations. However, there is a complementary technology, stem cell-derived gametes, which has been making rapid progress and which could amplify the impact of embryo selection, enabling very large changes if successfully applied to humans.” – h/t mike anissimov!

Cooperation and conflict between women in the family – “Reproductive competition within and between families may have underpinned the biological evolution of fertility patterns (such as menopause) and the cultural evolution of marriage, residence, and inheritance norms (such as late male marriage or primogeniture), which can enhance cooperation and minimize the observed incidence of such conflicts.”

Bone flute discovery indicates 9000 years of Chinese music tradition – “Archaeologists announced the discovery of three ancient flutes made of red-crowned crane bones that may prove that Chinese have been playing music for 9,000 years. The flutes were excavated at an ancient tomb in the site of a Neolithic settlement in Henan Province…. The bone flutes, pictured above, are thought to be the world’s earliest heptatonic musical instruments ever discovered.”

Total Fertility Rate – “Oversimplifying, if your tribe has 60 men and 40 women, if each woman has two kids during her lifetime, when the next generation turns over, your population will have declined from 100 people to 80. Conversely, if your tribe has 40 men and 60 women, and each woman has two kids, your tribe will have grown from 100 to 120. The female sex is the limiting factor when it comes to reproduction, after all.” – from the awesome epigone.

Earlier Onset of Puberty in Girls Linked to Obesity – “[T]he respective ages at the onset of breast development varied by race, body mass index (obesity), and geographic location. Breast development began in white, non-Hispanic girls, at a median age of 9.7 years, earlier than previously reported. Black girls continue to experience breast development earlier than white girls, at a median age of 8.8 years. The median age for Hispanic girls in the study was 9.3 years, and 9.7 years for Asian girls. Body mass index was a stronger predictor of earlier puberty than race or ethnicity.” – h/t hbd bibliography!

What color are Whites? – “In reality, most *Français de souche* act as individuals and have only a weak sense of their collective interest. Collective action is instead wielded by better organized factions, particularly the globalized business community—which lobbies hard to outsource employment to low-wage countries and insource low-wage workers.” – from peter frost.

bonus bonus: There’s a global morality gap — and it’s getting wider – “It is now clear, though not much talked about, that humanity, all 7.1 billion of us, tends to fall into one of two distinct camps. On the one side are those who buy into the whole post-Enlightenment human rights revolution. For them the moral trajectory of the last 300 years is clear: once we were brutal savages; in a few decades, the whole planet will basically be Denmark, ruled by the shades of Mandela and Shami Chakrabarti. And there’s some truth in this trajectory — except for the fact that it only applies to half the planet. The other half resolutely follows a different moral code: might is right, all men were not created equal and there is a right and a wrong form of sexual orientation. You can identify those countries in the dark half of the divide by their attitudes to homosexuality and women; to honour killings, race, disability, mental illness, religious minorities and to crime, torture and punishment, even animal rights and the environment.” – h/t ed west!

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Founding of the Darien Colony – “The Darien Colony [in panama!] was founded by Scottish emigrants on November 3rd, 1698. But it all went horribly wrong.”

Do Elite ‘Power Sport’ Athletes Have a Genetic Advantage? – “A specific gene variant is more frequent among elite athletes in power sports…. A ‘functional polymorphism’ of the angiotensiogen (AGT) gene is two to three times more common in elite power athletes, compared to nonathletes or even elite endurance athletes, according to the new research by Paweł Cięszczyk, PhD, of University of Szczecin, Poland, and colleagues.”

Ballet Dancers’ Brains Adapt to Stop Them Getting in a Spin – or maybe they start off with somewhat different brain structures: “Scientists have discovered differences in the brain structure of ballet dancers that may help them avoid feeling dizzy when they perform pirouettes…. The brain scans revealed differences between the groups in two parts of the brain: an area in the cerebellum where sensory input from the vestibular organs is processed and in the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for the perception of dizziness. The area in the cerebellum was smaller in dancers.”

Genetic study pushes back timeline for first significant human population expansion – “Using new genetic tools, the authors conclude that the first significant expansion of human populations appears to be much older than the emergence of farming and herding, dating back to the Paleolithic (60,000-80,000 years ago) rather than Neolithic age (10,000 years ago). They also suggest that strong Paleolithic expansions may have favored the emergence of sedentary farming in some populations during the Neolithic.” – h/t malcolm pollack!

New Approach to Explaining Evolution’s Big Bang – “[T]he Cambrian Explosion was preceded by a rise in sea level that submerged vast swaths of land, eroding the drowned rocks…. But these great floods also poisoned the ocean. The erosion of the coastlines released calcium, which can be toxic to cells. In order to survive, animals had to evolve ways to rid themselves of the poison. One solution may have been to pack the calcium into crystals, which eventually evolved into shells, bones, and other hard tissues. Dr. Smith doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that several different lineages of bilaterians evolved hard tissues during the Cambrian explosion, and not sooner.”

Understanding how infants acquire new words across cultures – “[I]n English, 24-month-old infants were better able to learn novel verbs for novel actions (e.g., petting) if the surrounding noun phrases were explicitly mentioned (e.g., ‘The girl is petting the dog’) than if they were dropped from the sentence (e.g., ‘Look. Petting!’). In contrast, the new research shows that in Korean (a language in which noun phrases are typically dropped in conversation) 24-month-olds were better able to learn novel verbs for novel actions if the surrounding noun phrases (e.g., the girl, the dog) were dropped; in fact, unlike English-acquiring infants, those acquiring Korean struggled if the nouns were explicitly mentioned.” – don’t know, unfortunately, what the ethnicities of these infants are.

The Science Fiction Future of Genetic Genealogy – “Next month at the American Society of Human Genetics 2013 meeting, researchers from AncestryDNA will present their work detailing the reconstruction of portions of the genomes of an 18th-century couple using detailed genealogical information and Identity-by-Descent (‘IBD’) DNA segments from several hundred descendants of the couple in the AncestryDNA database. In other words, researchers identified several hundred descendants of a certain couple living in the 1700s and then used the DNA shared by those descendants to recreate as much of the couples’ genomes as possible.” – cool! from the genetic genealogist.

Low-Hanging Fruit: Consider the Ant – “Some spiders somehow fly by using silken threads. They’ve been detected at altitudes over 4 km, and more than a thousand miles from land. The usual notion is that these threads catch air currents, but that may not be the real explanation. For one thing, they seem to be able to take off fairly rapidly in a dead calm. It looks instead as if these spiders manage to impart a negative charge to these threads and are then propelled upward by the atmospheric electric field – electrostatic levitation, a totally novel mechanism for flight.” – whoa! – from greg cochran.

Brainwashed by a microbe? – “*T. gondii* is being studied for possible behavioral effects mainly because it has attracted so much attention. But we’re probably being manipulated by other parasites. ‘A large number of parasitic organisms probably exist in helminths, protozoa, fungi, bacteria, archea and viruses that may influence the phenotype of their human host even more than the Toxoplasma. These organisms are, however, still waiting for research teams to engage in a systematic study of their influence on the human host.'” – from peter frost. previously.

When the Melting Pot Reaches a Boil – “If there is one constant in the travails of *Homo sapiens sapiens*, it is that he gets on best with his own kind. Yet to the social engineers who would shepherd us into multicult euphoria, it is as if these millennia of inter-ethnic strife didn’t exist.”

How Alcohol Conquered Russia – “A history of the country’s struggle with alcoholism, and why the government has done so little about it.” – take note of anatoly’s comments!

bonus: mitual shah – one of the good guys. one of the VERY good guys: Briton died saving children in terror mall – “A British marketing executive was shot dead in the Westgate massacre in Kenya after offering himself as a hostage to bargain for the lives of 33 children.”